Welcome to the Piano World Piano ForumsOver 2 million posts about pianos, digital pianos, and all types of keyboard instruments
Join the World's Largest Community of Piano Lovers
(it's free)
It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

most mp3 players have voice recorder in them, and if you place it correctly, the sound is adequate.

I have a Sansa myself. My wife has an old iRiver with 512mb and she still uses it to record all the time. It does a really good job. It's a minimal investment, I bet you can find those on e-bay or amazon for pretty low.

what's interesting is my wife first bought a (dedicated) voice recorded. and the quality was horrible. The iRiver (or sansa) are way better. I would venture any mp3 player is. Don't expect wonders. Something like a Zoom will do much better.

The camera solution might be ok but editing the video afterwards is difficult, compared to sound. And it's more expensive, and you'll need a ton of memory space.

And will your student be comfortable knowing he's being video recorded? maybe ...

John V.D.Brook video tapes all his lessons and sends home a DVD-RW of the lesson. Maybe he'll be along to discuss this.

I recorded my last recital using an Olympus DS-30. This voice recorder gives better quality than the standard voice recorder, but not as good as a Zoom. The big problem was that it only limited ability to control the microphone gain.

If it's ultimate ease of use, then a dvd based camcorder works well. You record the session, finalize the disk (in the camera) and hand them the disc to take home, they watch it on their dvd player. Pretty straight forward, also has the added benefit of providing video for those times when they need to see how something is done.

In a similar vein, a memory card based camcorder can work well and be fairly inexpensive. You can have the students provide their own memory cards (2GB models go for way less than $20 these days and provide enough storage for an hour). You record the session, pop the memory card out and hand it to them. The downside is that they'll need to have a computer to play the video vs being able to do it on their tv. This may or may not be a problem depending on their home setup.

For audio only, a memory card based solution where the student supplies their own card works well also. This way you don't have to deal with downloading the audio to a pc and then emailing or copying to a usb drive (or even worse, burning onto a cd).